Where no one has gone before

Sophomore is first to land NIH laboratory internship in Washington Semester Program

Jana Liese wanted to go where no one had gone before, at least in the Washington Semester
Program, a USC Honors College program that selects a handful of college students from
across South Carolina for an immersion semester in D.C.

Jana Liese has taken the road less traveled for her Washington Semester Program experience.
She landed an internship in a National Institutes of Health research lab.

The sophomore biochemistry and molecular biology major had her sights set on an internship
at the National Institutes of Health but learned most students in the program interned
in congressional offices or at think tanks or museums. In 27 years, no one had ever
landed an internship in a research lab.

“At first, I was a little dejected,” Liese says. “But then I decided I’m going to
make this happen.”

Liese, the daughter of Arnold School of Public Health professor Angela Liese, started
making calls, contacting six research labs at NIH. She soon found her dream internship
— working in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases headed by Jeffrey Cohen, M.D. He
called Bert Ely, a USC biology professor in whose lab Liese had worked since the beginning
of her freshman year, and was satisfied that the young undergraduate could be a productive
member of his research team.

“I want to do infectious disease as a career,” says Liese, a student in USC's Honors
College. “It began in my junior year of high school when I started reading ‘The Hot
Zone,’ about the Ebola outbreak in Reston, Va. I thought, ‘This is incredible,’ and
then realized I could make a career doing that kind of research.”

Liese’s internship at NIH is tied to research aimed at developing a vaccine for the
Epstein-Barr virus, which causes infectious mononucleosis and other serious health
conditions for immunocompromised individuals. In the lab, Liese is introducing foreign
DNA into mammalian cells to express glycoproteins found on the outside of the Epstein-Barr
virus, an important step in development of a potential vaccine. She has also accompanied
Dr. Cohen on rounds with patients who have Epstein-Barr-related illnesses.

Liese’s semester in Washington isn’t all lab work. She’s taking a theater class and
a current political trends course with the other Washington Semester Program students,
but it’s clear that science is her thing.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do my first year in college, but biochemistry seemed
like a good place to start,” she says. “I love being in a lab. I definitely grew up
in a family where being curious about things was the norm.”

Before her internship in Washington, Liese says she was dead set on going to graduate
school to earn a doctoral degree, probably in infectious diseases. “Now I’m interested
in the intersection of clinical research and medicine,” she says, noting that a joint
M.D./Ph.D. program might be her preferred route after graduating from Carolina. Of
course, that means tough sledding through several years of graduate study, but Liese
already has demonstrated that determination can make a way.

“Within reason, you sometimes don’t take no for an answer if it’s something you’ve
done your homework on and know that you want to pursue,” Liese says. “So far, that’s
what I’ve found that works for me.”

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The University of South Carolina offers the state’s most comprehensive suite of health disciplines, with two schools of medicine, four clinical campuses and programs in public health, pharmacy, nursing, social work and many other academic areas. Overall, the university offers more than 100 health science degree programs.